The Actipro Blog

What We Accomplished

In this quarter, we released the 2011.2 versions of WPF Studio and Silverlight Studio.  Numerous major new feature areas were added to SyntaxEditor, and WPF saw the release of our new Themes for WPF product, which unifies and improves how theming is done across our WPF products, adds full themes for native controls, and facilitates consistent app-wide themes.

What’s Coming Next

There are a lot of exciting things coming in the next several months:

• A brand new web site that has been in development for over a year
• Updates to our WinForms products
• A new product coming to WPF and Silverlight
• More SyntaxEditor features

Blog Post List

Here is a quick categorized list of useful blog postings made in this quarter.

• SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on - Anonymous Types
• WPF Studio 2011.2 Build 551 Released
• WPF Studio 2011.2 Released
• Themes for WPF Part 6 - Wrapping Up
• Themes for WPF Part 5 - Tinting Support
• Themes for WPF Part 4 - Built-In Themes
• Themes for WPF Part 3 - Docking/MDI Visual Updates
• Themes for WPF Part 2 - Common Asset Pool
• Themes for WPF Part 1 - Native WPF Control Themes
• Silverlight Studio 2011.2 Released

What We Accomplished

In this quarter, we continued enhancing the 2011.1 versions of WPF Studio and Silverlight Studio.

SyntaxEditor added extensibility to context menus.  Its Web Languages Add-on was updated to allow XML validation for DTDs, and support for !DOCTYPE internal subsets.  Its .NET Languages Add-on improved resolver support for generic method type inference, lambda expressions, and more.  Documents no longer need a filename to get IntelliPrompt working, numerous XML comment editing features were added, code outlining for #regions and documentation comments were added, and overall IntelliPrompt was improved.

Docking/MDI added features for live splitting support, along with a visual preservation option for MVVM usage.  Other products received minor updates.

What’s Coming Next

Admittedly, we’ve been a little quiet lately.  The reason is that we’ve been hard at work on enhancements and new features!

So far, some of the recent blog posts (see below) have announced some very highly-requested new features coming to SyntaxEditor in the 2011.2 version.  These features are all wrapped up and ready to go.

We’re currently working on finishing up some very major themes updates that will be coming to WPF Studio.  We’ll be posting details on what these encompass in the coming couple of weeks.  As soon as they are completed, we’ll get the 2011.2 version out.

Blog Post List

Here is a quick categorized list of useful blog postings made in this quarter.

• Want SyntaxEditor in Windows 8 Metro?
• SyntaxEditor - Drag and Drop
• SyntaxEditor - Code Fragments
• SyntaxEditor - Single-Line Edit Mode
• SyntaxEditor - IntelliPrompt Parameter Info Samples
• SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on - IntelliPrompt Parameter Info
• Silverlight Studio 2011.1 Build 112 Released
• WPF Studio 2011.1 Build 544 Released

What We Accomplished

In this quarter, we continued enhancing the 2011.1 versions of WPF Studio and Silverlight Studio.

Docking/MDI for WPF received an innovative linked DockSite feature, that allows you to drag docking windows between two or more separate DockSites.  Auto-hide flyouts were updated to support interop content.

PropertyGrid for WPF added a new interop feature for allowing customers transitioning from WinForms to use their old UITypeEditor’s in drop-downs or dialogs, just like they did with the WinForms PropertyGrid.

Editors for WPF added support for entering gradient brushes in BrushEditBox, part of those updates being the addition of ColorComponentSlider and GradientBrushSlider to the Shared Library.

SyntaxEditor added support for AST node ID values and code generation from the Language Designer.

The SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on received an enormous number of new resolver and automated IntelliPrompt features: completion, generic types, type inference, extension methods, doc comment display, doc comment stub generation, generic method type parameter inference, lambda expressions, and much more.

What’s Coming Next

We’ll hopefully be publishing another maintenance release of the 2011.1 WPF and Silverlight products in the next week or two.  This release will include all of the new features recently blogged about for the SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on, along with other miscellaneous updates to various products.

Following that, we will begin work on the 2011.2 codebase.  We already have a very good start on a new product that will be added for that codebase, which we will reveal in time.  We also will be jumping back into adding more features to the core SyntaxEditor control.  Things like parameter info, single line mode, etc. have been requested by a lot of customers and we plan to deliver those in 2011.2.

Blog Post List

Here is a quick categorized list of useful blog postings made in this quarter.  More...

What We Accomplished

In this quarter, we released new 2011.1 versions of WPF Studio and Silverlight Studio.  WPF Studio got a new QR Code 2D bar code, MVVM and Prism support for Docking/MDI, and new Calculator, Rating, and FanPanel controls.  Silverlight Studio got new Bar Code and Wizard products, along with Rating and FanPanel controls.

SyntaxEditor in both WPF and Silverlight received a ton of new updates.  Our LL(*) Parser Framework (used to build text parsers) now supports typed AST node creation, it got numerous new callback and error handling features, the Language Designer can now code generate AST node types, and .NET 4 text rendering enhancements were added.

The first version of the SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on was launched for both WPF and Silverlight, which provides syntax highlighting, parsing, AST generation, syntax error reporting, and automatic outlining for C# and VB when editing in SyntaxEditor.

We launched a large update to our Icons Essentials product that brings the total number of icons up to over 30,000 images.  We added a new Icons Elements product that lets you build your own customized icons by combining the elements with other existing icons to give them new meaning.

What’s Coming Next

We’re currently working on numerous enhancements for our Docking/MDI product.  We’ve also started on a new product that will provide themes for native controls that match themes for our custom controls.  This has been highly requested by our customers.

Finally we’re continuing to work very hard to build our next generation SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on.  Our goal with the add-on is to get automated IntelliPrompt starting to function in the coming weeks while editing C# and VB.

Blog Post List

Here is a quick categorized list of useful blog postings made in this quarter.  More...

What We Accomplished

In this quarter we got Silverlight Studio 2010.2 released and focused on enhancing our existing WPF products.  Ribbon for WPF got some huge updates that added the nicest Office 2010 themes available with Backstage support.  SyntaxEditor and other controls got a number of minor improvements too.

We moved our web site to a newer faster server and redesigned the look of our blog to improve readability and overall aesthetics.

What’s Coming Next

We’re planning on launching WPF Studio 2011.1 sometime in January.  This new version will have a number of new features mentioned in recent posts such as Docking/MDI’s new MVVM support and Prism integration, large updates to the SyntaxEditor LL(*) Parser Framework, and numerous enhancements to our other controls.  It will also have several new components that we’ll mention in the coming posts.

WPF Studio 2011.1 will also showcase the first public beta release of the .NET Languages Add-on for the WPF platform.  While this first beta won’t have automated IntelliPrompt yet, it will have parsing, AST construction, syntax error reporting, and automatic outlining for C#/VB.

We’ll get Silverlight Studio 2011.1 out shortly after WPF Studio 2011.1’s release.

Blog Post List

Here is a quick categorized list of useful blog postings made in this quarter.  More...

What we accomplished

In Quarter 3 of 2010 we made some very large enhancements to the controls in WPF Studio, and published the WPF Studio 2010.2 version.  See our newsletter for a summary and screenshots that show what was updated.

To quickly review, SyntaxEditor’s new LL(*) Parser Framework was added in 2010.2, opening the door for us to work on language add-ons similar to the WinForms SyntaxEditor version.  The Web Languages Add-on with an advanced XML language implementation was the first language add-on made available. 

Ribbon, Docking/MDI, Navigation, and other products received Office 2010 theme updates. 

Docking/MDI added complete layout (including MDI area) serialization options and other new serialization and UI features. 

PropertyGrid got performance enhancements and support for nested categories.

Views added a new Book control.

What’s coming next

We’ll be continuing to enhance our WPF controls in the coming weeks.  We have some more Editors and Views controls in the works.  We also will be working on the backstage view for Ribbon.

In the SyntaxEditor realm, we’ll be continuing to add new features and will be beginning work on a WPF/Silverlight version of the .NET Languages Add-on.

For Silverlight, we will be releasing Silverlight Studio 2010.2 very soon.  This new version adds all the recent SyntaxEditor updates (LL(*) Parser Framework, Web Languages Add-on, etc.) and adds the Book control to Views.

Blog post list

Here is a quick categorized list of useful blog postings made in this quarter.  More...

What we accomplished

In Quarter 2 of 2010 we had several major product releases. 

WPF Studio 2010.1 was launched, which added the new Views for WPF product, made numerous enhancements to various WPF control products, updated all products to target .NET 3.5 SP1, and added Visual Studio 2010 integration. 

Silverlight Studio, our new bundle of controls for the Silverlight 4 platform, was also launched.  It contains ports of our popular SyntaxEditor code editor control and the new Views for WPF product, along with other useful controls and components found in its Shared Library.

Finally, we relaunched WPFpedia.com, our 100% free community resource guide for WPF developers.  It is written using the latest web technologies and allows you to easily find information on nearly any WPF development-related topic on the web.

What’s coming next

Now that we are past the Silverlight Studio release, we’re jumping back on adding new features and enhancements to our existing WPF products for a while.  We have a lot of updates planned over the coming weeks so stay tuned to our blog for details.

For a high-level list of what we’ll be working on, please see the July 2010 newsletter that will be posted shortly.

Blog post list

Here is a quick categorized list of useful blog postings made in this quarter.  More...

What we accomplished

In Quarter 1 of 2010 we added some very major new features to SyntaxEditor for WPF: complete code outlining support, hidden regions, intra-text adornments, and IME support.  Navigation for WPF saw the addition of a ZoomContentControl, which allows you to scroll through large content easily.

We added designer support, item templates, and toolbox integration for our products in Visual Studio 2010.

What’s coming next

We have been a little quieter on the blog the past couple months but that’s because we’ve been hard at work trying to prep WPF Studio 2010.1 so that it’s ready to go the week of Visual Studio 2010’s release in mid-April.  WPF Studio 2010.1 will be moving to target .NET 3.5 SP1 and we will be including sample projects in VS 2010 format, optionally with VS 2008 format as well.

We have some big updates to our existing products, some of which we’ll give some more info on as we get closer to launch.

We are going to be launching a new WPF control product with WPF Studio 2010.1 too.

We also have been building up our product infrastructure for a Silverlight Studio 2010.1 bundle.  This has taken a while but we are plugging through it and hope to get a public beta out in the May timeframe.  The first version will include SyntaxEditor for Silverlight and a Silverlight version of the unnamed new product.

Finally, we are very close to having a re-launch of our wpfpedia.com WPF resource guide site ready.  We’re really excited about it and we think you will be too when you get to see and use it.  The new design is very “web 2.0”.

Keep an eye on our blog for more details on all of the above.

Blog post list

Here is a quick categorized list of blog postings made in this quarter.  More...

What we accomplished

In Quarter 4 of 2009 we mostly focused on getting the WPF Studio 2009.2 release out. 

SyntaxEditor for WPF saw major updates to the Language Designer application, along with a ton of new features including tagging, adornments, squiggle lines, and much more.

Some screens and video showing the future SyntaxEditor for Silverlight control were made available.  This control shares most of the same framework as the WPF version of SyntaxEditor.

Docking/MDI for WPF added floating document support similar to the functionality found in Visual Studio 2010.  All floating windows can now be maximized and custom chromes can be used for rendering the window border/titlebars.

Editors for WPF added a new AnalogClock controls, and used this new clock on the DateTimeEditBox dropdown when appropriate.  A new editbox and a list control were added to support easy end user editing of enumeration values.

Navigation for WPF added a new ZoomContentControl that provides an intuitive interface for scrolling/zooming any large content, such as maps, pictures, reports, etc.

Ribbon for WPF added support for multi-row in-ribbon galleries.

All WPF controls received VS 2010 and Blend 3 designer support.

The SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on for WinForms added C# 4.0 and VB 10.0 parsing support.

What’s coming next

In the coming months, we plan on expanding our product line, getting more into the Silverlight realm, and updating Ribbon to use newer Office 2010 features.

Newsletters

The December 2009 newsletter gave an overview of the WPF Studio 2009.2 release along with other recent updates and future plans.

Blog post list

Here is a quick categorized list of blog postings made in this quarter.  More...

What we accomplished

In Quarter 3 of 2009 we focused on adding some significant value to our existing products while adding some new DataGrid support.

SyntaxEditor for WPF saw the implementation of the multi-threaded syntactic/semantic parsing framework, integration with ANTLR parsers via a new add-on, AST construction and error reporting features for the MGrammar add-on, and robust hit testing.

DataGrid for WPF was introduced as a new free product for our customers.  It is a couple of add-ons that provide behavior extensions, new themes, and Editors for WPF integration with the open source Microsoft WPF DataGrid control.

Docking/MDI for WPF added tab tinting, standard MDI window icons, and magnetism features.

What’s coming next

Right now we’re doing some very major enhancements to the SyntaxEditor Language Designer tool, so that it will be very easy to create language definitions used by SyntaxEditor for WPF.  Once these enhancements are complete and documented, we’ll publish what will probably be the final WPF Studio 2009.1 maintenance release.  More information will be posted soon on the updates we’re doing.

Following the final 2009.1 release, we will be working on some big updates for a WPF Studio 2009.2 version that shouldn’t be too far behind.  One cornerstone feature of 2009.2 will be floating documents like those found in VS 2010.  We have some other surprises planned as well.

Blog post list

Here is a quick categorized list of blog postings made in this quarter.  More...